Gish Jen quotes:

Chinese language tends to be quick, economical. To know what people are saying, you always need to know what the context is.

... there is ... a big aspect of play in writing novels, and making the story more and more elaborate is just more and more fun.

A man was the sum of his limits; freedom only made him see how much so.

I think that there is a bias in the current literary climate, which is not only very Western but very male.

These are ideas that work for many, and that may well reflect your true understanding of life.

A white person was by definition somebody. Other people needed, across their hearts, one steel rib.

For students who are in the most creative group in America to somehow be presumed to be narrow is just completely meshugga.

I hate to generalize because there are always so many exceptions to any rule.

I like to listen. I'm much more interested in listening than in speaking, for sure.

I'm trying to give people an idea of what black looks like and what white looks like before I introduce them to gray.

It's a matter of whether you see the self as fundamentally in relationship to other selves or not - whether you see the boundary between self and the world as relatively permeable, which makes you "interdependent" (collectivist) in outlook, or relatively impermeable, which makes you "independent" (individualistic).

It's human to hear stories and to know how people live and to imagine how that is for them. It's very interdependent!

Many women tend toward the interdependent end of things, we tend to see ourselves in relationship to others to a far greater degree than men.

That there should be a purpose to suffering, that a person should be chosen for it, special - these are houses of the mind, in which whole peoples have found shelter.

The independents are the ones who tend to commit suicide. I'm not against this way of being in the world. Individuals have brought us many treasures. You can't just say that's a bad way of being in the world - it's not. But it's not everyone's way of being in the world.

There's nothing about interdependence that would keep somebody from making art.

Whatever I do in life, I'm almost always aware that there's another way to do it.

When I think about why I would be a writer, why I should continue to be a writer, it seems to me one of the few things you can dowhere you're never bored.

Anything is possible. A man is what he makes up his mind to be.